Feature Requests

Animate and Photoshop are great tools for cel animation but both lack the usability for modern motion design workflows that After Effects would provide. Adding support for photoshop-style raster animation in After Effects would bring this powerful technique into the right environment, and add features useful for unrelated workflows.To solve this, I propose the addition of a new Frame Paint Effect, which would would enable a fast, non-parametric way to paint into an effect. It would work like this:Photoshop brush engine- Painting pixels not strokes.- Focus on speed, quality and tablet pressure/tilt support, NOT editability.- Ideally you'd be able to paint into both the layer viewer and the comp viewer if you want, so you animate in context of other layers.Onion Skin!- This should be done on the effect level like 3D Camera Tracker points, so it's there when you need it (when you have the effect selected) but doesn't get rendered.- Options for duration, opacity, and incoming/outgoing colo

Allow workspaces to be easily imported/exported/synced without the need to manually copy/paste workspace.xml files from the preferences folder every time a new machine or install is used.

Cinema4D's Attribute Panel allows a user to select multiple layers, and modify various attributes that those layers share, at once. After Effects could certainly benefit from this. Could be extended to shape layer properties, etc.

Text should have underline option

When scripting, we sometimes have to be able to "store" a property to do something later with it ;For example, very often, scripts use the "comment" property of the layers to store data like this.The problem is: there are only three ways to get a property:- the matchName, but there can be a lot of properties with the same matchName- the name, but it can be changed by users, so it is not reliable- the index, which can be changed by users too.This is very problematic, especially for Effects, or Shapes content, and the new master properties, which can be renamed AND reordered, so there is no reliable way to store a property in scripts.Adding a unique identifier would solve this issue. It could work the same way the .id attribute work with items (comp, footage, folder).

This is an Adobe CC wide issue but AE is where I notice it the most.Please revert the icons to the multi-colored versions! It makes no sense to make them the same color when the "themes" break down beyond video and photo use. I used the colors to quickly locate the software I needed to open, now I have a taskbar full of purple and have to squint to tell which letters I am clicking on. It seems like a very poor design choice that was likely made by the boardroom, not the creative team, and I beg you to change the icons back - or at least give US the option to have the multiple colors instead of mono-purple, which I'll add looks horrendous on a dark theme display.

Adding large TSV files with multiple columns and rows seems to bloat AE projects that link to the data.This is especially noticeable when multiple comps and pre comps link to data via expressions. It can be improved a bit by having the data only appear in one comp and then being linked to from other comps rather than adding the data to each comp. But overall the interface still runs much slower, and exports are considerably slower when rendering comps linking to data especially when the data file contains many rows and columns. Anything that can be done to improve performance makes using data in AE much more viable

Fix the way motion path bezier handles work so it is more intuitive.No After Effects I don't want these two keyframes which are right on top of each other to move. I Just want them to hold in the one position.Example: https://imgur.com/a/li3eC

It would be very handy to be able to click and drag for both dimensions of multidimensionnal properties (or spatial properties only?) in the timeline (like positions), using both axis of the mouse.This could be done through an additionnal icon, to keep the current behaviour on individual axis (see screenshot example)In case the property has three dimensions, this icon could be used to adjust only X and Y.This would make it easier to work with layers while hiding layer handles, allowing us to quickly move the layers without selecting/clicking in the viewport.Working with hidden layer handles improves a lot the interactive performance, which is very important when manipulating layers/rigged characters for example.It is also a big comfort as you can see the actual image you're working on, not polluted with handles.Even with handles, being able to move the layers like this is a good way to avoid inadvertently scaling the layers with the handles in the viewport, something we do so often peo